Sheldon Johnston has heard many horror stories of dream houses gone wrong, of gaps between dry wall and light fixtures, faulty windows, lousy wiring and worst of all, a hole in a new foundation that was not covered by warranty.

Over the past six months, the Edmonton Journal and Calgary Herald produced the province’s first definitive count of child welfare fatalities, based on death records unsealed by the Alberta government after a four-year legal battle.

Alberta’s ban on publicizing the names and photos of children who die in provincial care is one of the most restrictive in the country, robbing grieving families of their ability to raise concerns in public about the deaths and sheltering government officials from scrutiny.

Everybody in the Alberta government calls the oilsands Canada’s greatest buried treasure or maybe the goose that laid the golden egg and certainly the economic engine of a nation. Everybody except perhaps provincial cabinet minister Doug Griffiths.

1948 Oilsands Ltd. Bitumount plant becomes property of the Alberta government. Premier Ernest Manning takes all the members of the legislative assembly on a tour of the plant. But the plant is not successful and is shuttered in September.

Fort McMurray — For about three weeks last August, federal scientist Stewart Cober and crew piled into a turboprop aircraft and flew directly over the huge smokestacks on the Suncor oilsands site to capture the fumes. The plane then dipped down to get a reading on the black exhaust from the big trucks hauling bitumen in the open-pit mine and banked low to fly over the tailings ponds to take a read on pollution escaping the oily surface. The flights take about four hours and the scientists flew 20 times, gathering data on 300 chemicals in the air, from smelly hydrocarbons to dust from the gravel roads, nitrogen dioxide and sulphur dioxide, particulate matter and mercury emissions.

For decades, the provincial government maintained that oilsands production was not polluting air or water in the northeast. The conventional wisdom held that pollutants were naturally present because of bitumen deposits near the rivers. That position was abandoned between 2010 and 2012 after independent scientific reports found contaminants from the expanded open-pit mines and upgraders are accumulating in the Athabasca River and lakes far from the mines.

As global climate talks continue to flounder, it’s time to try another model — a smaller group of countries with a history of co-operation, the 53-member Commonwealth, says Edmonton policy consultant and writer Satya Das. Alberta, with the largest fossil fuel reserves among the former British colonies, is well placed to show some leadership, Das said Friday.

Opposition parties accused Premier Alison Redford of rewarding a political ally while making a bad deal for Albertans as further details became public around the $130,000 severance paid to her former chief of staff for six months of work. On Friday, Stephen Carter’s severance agreement was posted online by a Global Television reporter, who received it through a freedom of information request.

This week’s Edmonton Journal and Calgary Herald series has raised a great deal of emotions for Albertans, MLAs and the many Albertans who work to get the best results for children across our province each and every day.

One of two First Nations downstream of Sherritt International’s Obed Mountain coal mine is complaining it has been kept in the dark about the company’s massive leak into the Athabasca River. Alexis Nakota First Nation Chief Tony Alexis said Tuesday that he has voiced strong concerns with the company and Alberta government because the band has been excluded from conversations related to the implementation of an emergency response plan in the wake of what is thought to be the largest coal slurry spill in Canadian history.

Alberta Premier Alison Redford, in Washington to lobby leaders on the merits of TransCanada’s Keystone XL Pipeline, says she believes it is becoming more likely that the energy project will be approved by the U.S. government. “The discussions we have been able to have with people leads me to believe they are fully seized on these issues and that it is going very well,” Redford said during a short teleconference call Tuesday evening with reporters.

A group of 50 medical students went to the Alberta legislature Monday to press their case for a ban on flavoured tobacco products. The aspiring physicians met with about 25 MLAs from all parties, including Health Minister Fred Horne, said Linsday Bowthorpe, the political advocacy committee leader from the University of Alberta.

The future of Alberta’s oilsands industry is underground. Though open pit mines are the face of oilsands extraction today, only 20 per cent of Alberta’s 168.7 billion barrels of proven reserves are accessible through strip mines. The remaining 80 per cent is locked well below the surface. Going forward, pulling steamed bitumen from deep underground will be a bigger and bigger part of how Alberta extracts its oilsands wealth.

The capital region civic election offered a handful of surprises, upsets and losses after an early and decisive victory for Edmonton’s mayor-elect Don Iveson on Monday night. In Edmonton, former public school board chair Bev Esslinger will represent Ward 2, the only woman among the capital city’s municipal leaders. The win comes 18 months after Esslinger’s unsuccessful bid for the Progressive Conservatives in the northwest riding of Edmonton-Calder.

After the political dramatics of the weekend, the scene is pretty much set for the provincial election — as one major character entered the limelight and another was booed off the stage. Enthusiastic Wildrose members chose former federal politician Brian Jean as their new leader at a meeting Saturday night, but saved their loudest cheers of the evening for the news that their old leader Danielle Smith had lost her bid to become the Progressive Conservative candidate in the southern Alberta riding of Highwood.